Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

12 nearby and Hex went as a day boy. The very close relationship between mother and son was not surprising but clearly she was not ready to abandon him to boarding school yet. She says that ‘from the beginning, though he was not yet nine, he took a good place in cricket’. At Easter of 1886, the school moved to Higham, 6 near Nuneaton. Kate could not find lodgings there and also felt that her grandmother Anne, increasingly frail, needed her in Jersey, so from then on he boarded, though Kate found their parting ‘dreadful’. Kate later moved to Ealing, staying with Hex’s cousin Willie who was studying for the Indian Civil Service. According to Kate, Hex was mistreated by Mr Lea and caned frequently. At one point he was accused of stealing sweets from the pocket of another boy. Mr Lea, having decided that Hex was the culprit, told the other boys to send him to Coventry until he confessed. Kate recounts the tale that, lying on the sofa, it seemed to her that she saw Hesketh open the door and look in with a look of intense unhappiness. In any case she set straight off for the school and things were sorted out. Mr Lea ‘saw reason’: one suspects he was browbeaten into it. When Mr Lea came to the station with Hex to see Kate off, he apparently attempted to cheer him up by saying ‘these partings are sent to prepare us for the greater parting of death’. Although Hex was the best cricketer in the school, he once made a duck in an important match, so Mr Lea pinned a large ‘0’ on Hex’s coat. It seems likely that Hex stayed with the school because someone else was paying for it. Hex wrote at about this time to say he was reading Bulwer Lytton’s Rienzi , which he found ‘awfully jolly’, an odd turn of phrase. Richard Wagner’s first successful opera was based on the book, and it was apparently Adolf Hitler’s favourite. Bulwer Lytton was a best-selling author then, but is now remembered only for The Last Days of Pompeii. * * * * * * * So Hex’s education had not been entirely straightforward. He had started at a school in Jersey, then attended another which moved from Rugby to Nuneaton. He was at this time ultimately intended for the Army but some sources suggest he was found apparently unfit – a ‘weak heart’ or ‘a temporary delicacy of the heart’, a motif that keeps returning without very much in the way of evidence. Parker says nothing about this, though Kate suggests that Hex was never very keen on being a soldier. Strangely enough, or perhaps not, he found military music intensely depressing. The first plan, therefore, was that he would go to Wellington College, in Berkshire, on a Queen’s Scholarship, and according to his obituary in The Times ‘he was given a nomination to Wellington by the late Duke of Cambridge’, apparently with the assistance of a cousin of Kate’s, Colonel Young. Wellington was of course an army school and George, Duke of Cambridge was the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and a grandson of George III, so he could hardly have wanted a better recommendation. 6 Lindley Lodge, which was the school, is now a training centre for missionaries. India, Jersey and Edinburgh